Enter the Linux experience and free yourself from Microslop

Gaming on Linux is far from perfect, but today it is much, much more accessible than even a few years ago.
I am a an old tech user, so I know it can be troublesome to use Linux. I am quite happy that today we can really game on Linux. I played Stellaris, Cities Skylines, Heroes of the Storm (HotS), Diablo 2: Resurrected, Hearts of Iron 4, Total War Warhammer, X4: Foundations (9.0 update is lovely, and my Thrustmaster T.16000M + Throttle have no issues) without any issues on Linux. I tried Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era Demo when I saw it, and just clicked on Steam on Linux and Great Success!

1. realize that Linux is a myriad of systems, and some work better than others.

2. is the hardware, I have an AMD 6900 XT card, and the drivers have been excellent. 144Hz on my monitor and smooth as butter. My CPU is an AMD Ryzen 3600, and enough for my gaming needs. Having an NVIDIA GPU can make the experience far less enjoyable, sadly. From what I've read an OS like Bazzite helps.

3. gaming is it's own beast, and can be native or emulated. Most of the games, which held me back from ditching Winblows, are emulated. This will not work for mainstream/competitive titles requiring anti-cheat software. I don't play such games, so your mileage may vary. This includes Valorant, CoD, Battlefield, LoL, Marvel Rivals, and many others. Someone will correct me here, please do.

3.1 even if your games are NOT on Steam, Steam bridges the gap. This is where I finally found that barrier to gaming has been lowered.

So first thing's first, pick a stable Linux distro, and keep it simple. There will be questions, confusion, and different behaviours which will make it hard to transition from Microslop. I suggest Zorin Core, as I've had it in a dual boot since Zorin 16. It's been rock solid and I've bought Zorin 18 since, as a show of support. Now It's my main system and I've yet to turn Win on since at least March 2026.
Buying is not needed and you'll lack some customization, but you'll be able to use Zorin for regular tasks.
Now you're running two systems on your PC, Win & Linux of your choice. You can always go back to Win if you need to. My recommendation is to dual boot to get more used to Linux, while having the flexibility to go back to Win should you need to.

Learn about mounting drives/disks for your system. Zorin has the Disks software you can use to click through your system and add your windows disk, external drives, usb sticks, ss card, etc. You can also mount from the command line aka. shell, meaning your terminal app. This is a bit error prone, but you will only reallymess up something if you just copy-paste some random suggestion from the internet. Once you feel comfortable with this, I'd recommend learning how to make permanent mounting when your system starts. Again this can be done in Disks, or from the Terminal of your choosing. This will make you comfortable if for some reason you need to add something on the fly or mess up a command. Also it brings us closer to using what you already have, and that's your games already installed. But first we need Steam.

Install Steam, even if a game you want to play is NOT on Steam. You can then click on Games and add Non-Steam game.

After you click here you will have access to your drive(s). So if you did get acquainted with mounting disks you'll know where your games are. Find the disk, go to the directory where the game is, find it's ". exe" and select it. The best part about this is it works not only on games, but other programs as well. A bit more on that later.
Once a game has been added, Steam will pre-select a compatibility (emulation) "software". This will be something like Proton 11,or similar. Now you can click to close the dialog and click play to start the game. You will see the button text change to "Running". Be patient with it a bit. If you don't see something happening with the speed you're used to on Win it may be that there is a download in progress or the emulation is starting itself. If nothing happens, or the game Play button is shown again you may need to fiddle with the "emulation". Click on the cog wheel for game settings and select Compatibility.

Here you can check the checkbox "Force use of a specific..." and then click on the dropdown, as shown above. This will give you the option to select a different version of "emulation software". I've had success with Proton 10, Proton 11.
So you select one, close the settings, click on play and success!

So now you can play games you installed on Win on Linux.

I am someone who started with Blizzard games back in ye olden times of the Vikings, Warcraft 2 and Diablo (yes, I need some pills daily, here's your reminder to take your meds) and yes I'm saddened by the company culture I've learned about since. Even if the people running the company were, and are still, quite bad, I've played D2, D3, HotS and SC/SC2 for the great games they were. In the case of D3, I quite enjoyed it after Reaper of Souls, playing locally with friends and chasing trophies on PS4.
But I digress, were here for Linux gaming. This is where I love the following: add battle.net as a Non-Steam game in Steam as described above. When it runs, you can select, D2:R for example, then select "already installed" underneath the Install button. Find the game directory, wait for battle.net to do it's thing and then run the game. Now you have that on Linux as well.

For my gog games I used Heroic Launcher, works very well, but I installed only a few games directly on Linux. The Steam workaround would work in any case for those already installed with Win. The same worked for a few Epic games, and I haven't tried the Amazon games I have since I don't play those much. I have no reason to believe they would not work.

TLDR: I dual boot Linux with Win. I am happy to be able to play on Linux. I see people struggling with Linux gaming. I decided to write an imperfect how-to on my phone with steps that made me happy. Install Steam, add Non-Steam games to Steam. Use Steam to run battle.net, run battle.net games. Use Steam to run any Win game already installed on your PC.